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Evaluating Regulatory Reform: Banks' Cost of Capital and Lending

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Evaluating Regulatory Reform: Banks' Cost of Capital and Lending ∗ Evaluating Regulatory Reform: Banks’ Cost of Capital and Lending Anna Kovnery and Peter Van Tassely May 2019 Abstract We examine the effects of regulatory changes on banks’ cost of capital and lending. Since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the value-weighted CAPM cost of capital for banks has averaged 10.5% and declined by more than 4% relative to non-banks on a within-firm basis. This decrease was much greater for larger banks subject to new regulation than for smaller banks. Over a longer twenty-year horizon, we find that changes in the systematic risk of bank equity have real economic consequences: increases in banks’ cost of capital are associated with tightening in credit supply and loan rates. Keywords: Cost of Capital, Beta, Bank Regulation, Dodd-Frank Act, Banks JEL Classification: G12, G21, G28 ∗We are grateful to Charles Calomiris, Wilson Ervin, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Jeffrey Wurgler for discussing our paper and to Malcolm Baker, Mark Carey, Douglas Diamond, Fernando Duarte, Victoria Ivashina, George Pennacchi, René Stulz, and seminar participants at Chicago Booth, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Effects of Post-Crisis Banking Reforms Conference, the NBER Risks of Financial In- stitutions Conference, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and the Columbia/BPI Conference on Bank Regulation, Lending, and Growth for comments. We thank Davy Perlman, Anna Sanfilippo, and, particu- larly, Brandon Zborowski for outstanding research assistance. yFederal Reserve Bank of New York (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]): The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. 1 Introduction Bank regulations have changed dramatically over the past twenty years. Deregulation in the late 1990s repealed long-standing laws separating investment and commercial banking activities, allowing for the rise of larger and more complex global banking institutions. The financial crisis followed nearly a decade later prompting the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) which intensified regulation particularly for the largest banks. In this paper, we estimate the net effect of changing regulations on banks’ cost of capital and systematic risk, as well as the impact on bank lending supply. We find that the banking industry’s value-weighted CAPM cost of equity capital soared to over 15% during the finan- cial crisis, but then declined by 4.5% relative to non-banks after the passage of the DFA to 10.5%. At the same time, banks’ cost of capital has differentially increased by 1-2% in the post-DFA period relative to the late 1990s. Time-series changes in equity betas drive these results. Therefore, an additional interpretation of our findings is that post-crisis regulations have lowered systematic risk in the banking industry with the cost of capital for the very largest banks moving back toward its pre-deregulatory average. These changes matter for the real economy – when banks’ CAPM cost of capital falls, we find that banks expand credit supply and ease lending terms to borrowers. Rather than focus on the impact of a single regulation, such as changes to capital stan- dards, our approach acknowledges that banking regulations are endogenous and often change simultaneously. For example, consider the DFA. A priori, it is unclear what effect the DFA should have on the cost of capital for banks. The DFA increased effective capital require- ments, established recovery and resolution frameworks, and introduced new liquidity require- ments and leverage constraints, particularly for the largest banks. These different regulations have varied and potentially opposing effects on the cost of capital. Safer banks may be ex- pected to have a lower cost of capital, but any rollback in perceived government guarantees 1 may increase the cost of capital.1 Liquidity requirements may reduce the risk of bank runs but change banks’ profitability margins. The first contribution of this paper is to separate the net effect of regulatory changes from other factors impacting the cost of capital such as interest rates and the business cycle. We do this by estimating a variety of difference-in-differences specifications that compare changes in the cost of capital for banks to non-banks across periods separated by key dates in bank regulation. These regulatory changes are: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) (November 1999), Financial Crisis (January 2007), Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP) (May 2009), and DFA (July 2010). The results highlight the importance of examining changes to banks’ cost of capital relative to other firms and across time periods, rather than only focusing on pre-crisis versus post-crisis changes for banks (as in Sarin and Summers (2016)). To confirm that we are capturing changes to bank regulation and not other factors like interest rates, we take several approaches. First, we find similar results when we compare banks to non-bank financial intermediaries, a control group of firms with business models that are similar to banks but that are not directly affected by changes to bank regulation. Second, we compare changes for banks more affected by regulation to those less affected (large versus small). This analysis is particularly relevant when estimating changes around the passage of the DFA. Since the DFA, we find that the CAPM cost of capital for the largest banks has differentially declined by 3-4% relative to post-crisis highs and by 0-2% relative to the pre-GLB period. We also look within the largest US banks and study the staggered implementation of stress tests for banks with more than $50 billion in assets (as 1Even the impact of changes in capital requirements on the cost of equity is debated. On one hand, bankers argue that equity is more expensive than debt, so holding more equity increases the cost of capital with negative implications for growth and lending (see the discussion in Admati et al.(2014)). On the other hand, academics often contend that lower leverage should lower the cost of equity capital, leaving banks indifferent to their capital structure in the absence of tax advantages for debt and other frictions (Modigliani and Miller 1958). 2 in Flannery et al.(2017)) and find a differential decline in the CAPM cost of capital for the very largest stress-tested banks. Overall, the results suggest that the net effect of the DFA regulations was to lower the cost of capital for the largest banks, outweighing countervailing effects such as the potential for lower expectations of government insurance in the post-crisis period (Atkeson et al. 2018). Finally, we confirm our results by repeating our main regression specifications using multi- factor cost of capital estimates that incorporate interest rate factors (Schuermann and Stiroh 2006), CAPM cost of capital estimates with a time-varying equity risk premium (Cochrane 2011), log changes in CAPM betas that difference out the equity risk premium, and asset betas that de-lever bank stock returns (Baker and Wurgler 2015). Across measures, we consistently find a decrease in the cost of capital for the largest banks since the passage of the DFA. By some measures, we also estimate that the largest banks’ cost of capital has differentially fallen post-DFA relative to the levels that prevailed in the late 1990s. Our approach adds a different perspective to the set of papers that study the effect of in- dividual regulations on stock returns. For example, Baker and Wurgler(2015) show that the low-risk anomaly holds for bank stocks with the implication that higher capital requirements resulting in lower leverage and lower CAPM betas may not decrease the realized cost of eq- uity capital. Gandhi and Lustig(2015) and Kelly et al.(2016) examine implied government guarantees using size-sorted bank portfolios and equity option prices and find that too-big- to-fail subsidies decrease the cost of capital for the largest banks and for the financial sector. In contrast to studies that rely on a portfolio-based approach, our panel-based approach accounts for how changing bank business models and the changing composition of regulated banks affects the results. For example, this allows us to control for banking industry consol- idation around the financial crisis and the increase in non-interest income over the sample period. In addition, this paper also adds to the literature that studies how market measures 3 such as Tobin’s q are related to bank characteristics such as asset size, the value of intangi- bles, and the composition of bank assets (Minton et al.(2017), Calomiris and Nissim(2014), Huizinga and Laeven(2012)). For example, Calomiris and Nissim(2014) emphasize the changing market perception of the value of bank intangibles and leverage for market-to-book ratios. Similar to Calomiris and Nissim(2014), we find evidence of time-varying relation- ships of some bank characteristics. Specifically, the association between risk-weighted assets (RWA) and bank betas is strongest during the financial crisis, explaining most of the post- financial crisis fall in the CAPM cost of capital for the banking industry in aggregate. This result appears to be driven by loans and loan commitments, particularly real estate loans. Even with the inclusion of time-varying controls, however, there is still a significant decline in the post-DFA cost of capital for the largest banks, consistent with the interpretation that regulation has lowered systematic risk. The final contribution of the paper is to document that these changes in banks’ CAPM cost of capital matter for the real economy, thus relating our analysis to the real effects of bank regulation. We hypothesize that banks’ CAPM cost of capital matters because the CAPM is used in practice by managers, investors, and lawyers (Graham and Harvey(2001), Berk and van Binsbergen(2016), Gilson et al.(2000)).
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